Webenso » web 2.0

The power of Thematic hooks

Kathy Alice — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:51:50 +0000

As I begin to wrap up my first child theme using the Thematic framework, I must admit that I’m beginning to really appreciate the power of theme hooks. At first I was modifying the css to get where I wanted to be, for example altering margins, using the background url directive to add my custom header image. But when I got to the point where I wanted to suppress the display of the blog title and description, that is when I first found out about Thematic add and remove actions.

Oh sure I could have just used “display: none” in the css blog title class/ids so that the blog title didn’t display over my custom image, but that’s kind of ugly. Using remove_action in my functions.php file is much more elegant.

function suppress_header_elements() { remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogtitle',3); remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogdescription',5); } add_action('init','suppress_header_elements');

And the bonus is that the blog title description value still populate my title and meta description tags as desired for SEO optimization.

Theme hooks is not a concept unique to Thematic but embedded in WordPress itself. Using theme hooks in your child theme, the idea is that you can isolate your customizations in a single file in a functions.php file (it may be called something different such as custom_functions.php with other frameworks).

Although I had altered the css to add my image, I wanted to additionally add clickable button images as well that I already had defined in a css file. No problem, I just created a new function called add_buttons in my functions.php file, echo’ed out the HTML and then added the add_action line: function add_buttons() { echo .... } add_action('thematic_header', 'add_buttons');

It wasn’t completely smooth sailing as I ran into this error when I tried to use the admin (error text modified to remove site identifying info) Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/mysite/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/childtheme/functions.php:43) in /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865

Most of the information you get googling this error suggests there is extra spaces prior to the php start tag in the wpconfig.php file. That wasn’t the case here, but it was a good clue. Turns out I had an extra blank line after the closing php tag in my functions.php file. When I finally figured out to remove that, the errors went away.

What is Web 2.0 anyway? What’s next?

Kathy Alice — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:51:48 +0000

What’s next after Web 2.0? Cloud Computing? Maybe. The Semantic Web? Possibly. The problem with defining what’s next, is that Web 2.0 wasn’t a distinct new technology but is better described as a social movement. The technologies that sprung up to facilitate this new model of user interaction were a collection of re-purposed old technologies with some new, but I can’t think of any that were fundamentally paradigm shifts. A few months ago I was hiring. I was looking for some engineers for a contract. One resume that crossed my desk listed as a skill, “Web 2.0″. I posted to facebook, what does this mean? The answer from one of my friends, “it means that they surf all day”. Given the ease one can lose hours to “facebooking”, there is a ring of truth in this. 1 in 8 couples married this year met through social media. Think about it. My point though, is that Web 2.0 isn’t really a technical skill set. Perhaps the job applicant meant to say AJAX or Drupal. But there isn’t a technology one can put their finger on as *the* Web 2.0 technology. The wikipedia entry for web 2.0 is a good read. The Criticism section points out that many of the ideas that Web 2.0 were already implemented. The article in general supports my contention that web 2.0 is a social revolution not a technological one. Content creation power was placed into everyone’s hands. Networking online got taken up to a new level. So what’s next? One thing I think bears watching is the possible fragmentation of the web, at least from the search perspective. Google web search is only one way to find things. You can discover sites through social networking, youtube and twitter search. Communities that focus on niches are becoming more prevalent (although they have always been there). Regardless, it will take us a while to digest Web 2.0 and the next really big thing could be some time in coming. Although I’m sure there is someone out there working to prove me wrong.

Social Media Revolution

Kathy Alice — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:26:15 +0000

Lots of thoughts provoking stats, set to music by Fatboy Slim.

Twitter’s summer

Kathy Alice — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:54:49 +0000

Twitter is certainly having a momentous summer. There was the recent DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, that rendered it inoperative. And the battle lines between it and facebook became more clearly drawn. Twitter is definitively morphing before our eyes, as I recently alluded to in my “lost its shine” post, but the question is into what? The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine. If you haven’t jumped yet onto the twitter bandwagon, check out this blog post I got from the Web 2.0 group on LinkedIn, an excellent group of links on using twitter.

Internet Marketing Can Be Made Easy

Guest Author — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:03:57 +0000

Imagine learning exactly what you needed to know to succeed. The well known motivational author Anthony Robbins reveals in his book “Unlimited Power” the importance of modeling successful people in order to create your own successful life.Modeling someone good at what you want to learn allows you learn in hours what it might have taken the expert years to learn. Successful people realize that they do not need to know everything about a topic in order to succeed in marketing it. By leveraging the abilities of your employees or partners it becomes easy to create a level of success that is mind blowing. When you apply modeling to internet marketing, you can overcome the steep learning curve, and create success quickly by learning the steps that work for experienced marketers. Occupy the City is using this approach to level the fields of both network marketing and internet marketing. All members have access to incredible training put together by internet marketing experts. The broad vision of these experts and the power of people working together for common goals, is enabling us to optimize all of our sites, and get on the coveted first page of Google. Internet Marketing Techniques for Success If you have looked into internet marketing to build your business only to get overwhelmed by all the tasks that you have to do, you can see how a community can help. If you have tried your hand at network marketing but found that too much time was wasted with cold calls and face to face meetings, the internet marketing approach is what you were missing. As a member of Occupy the City you can learn how to optimize your blog posts, articles and any Web 2.0 property for the best results. Topics of internet marketing

Use of free Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo, Hubpages, and other Blog networks.
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A Beginners Guide To Social Media Marketing

Guest Author — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:38:37 +0000

In the past few years, Social Media and Social Media Marketing have become buzz- words. This is due to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Digg, etc. The social media have two components – user generated contents and the ability to form networks of friends for sharing contents. In sites like MySpace and Facebook users create their profile pages and use texts, pictures, and videos to embellish the pages. They can then share those contents with others in their friends’ network, or the social network In sites like Digg, YouTube, Flickr users submit a summary of news articles, pictures, videos and they vote on the contents submitted by others. Popular contents are featured on the homepage and it drives massive amount of traffic to support your Internet Marketing. There are many variations of the two models described above, including a combination of the two. Using the social media sites to promote your product or services (or a website) is called social media marketing. There are two types of traffic you get when your content becomes popular in a social media site. The primary traffic or the direct traffic comes from the site where it becomes popular. For sites like Digg, it can be huge and your site should be ready to handle the surge in traffic without crashing. When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. They will put a url to the content. The secondary traffic or the indirect traffic flows from those url long after the surge due to the primary traffic is over. So, what are the benefits of primary and secondary traffic from the social media sites? The primary traffic exposes your site to people who have no other means of knowing about your existence. Some of those visitors will become regulars to your site if you are providing something that they want on a regular basis. The greatest benefit is the natural url to your site given by others because they want to discuss your offering. Natural urlfrom a large number of relevant sites improve your search engine rankings and organic search traffic. Social media & Internet Marketing lets you expose your site to a large group of people. If your search engine traffic has leveled off, shifting your focus to the social media marketing and becoming successful in that will take you to the next level in search engine traffic. The only other alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is Internet Marketing & pay per click advertisement. If you are already running a PPC campaign, you can continue your PPC campaign through out the year to sustain increased traffic from search engines at a cost. Social media marketing is free and making your site popular a couple of times in a year is enough to sustain increased traffic through out the year.